To cut ten thousand jobs: Mayor Bloomberg, in the next two years—about six thousand from layoffs and four thousand through attrition—under his plan to help close the city’s $3.3 billion deficit. The proposal would also raise the price of parking meters and skimp on bread for prison inmates.

To forge ahead on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? The Senate Democrats may vote to repeal the law during the lame-duck session. In a press conference yesterday, Senator Joe Lieberman was emphatic that there are “more than sixty senators, I’m convinced, who are prepared to vote” for a defense-spending bill that includes a repeal of the ban on openly gay service members. But they might have to face a filibuster from John McCain, whose insistence that the government move slowly on the repeal is in opposition to the stances of his wife and daughter.

The ace pilot leading Virgin Galactic’s billion-dollar quest to make commercial space travel a reality.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.